SEALIFT: Towards far more sea rescue!

type:

Donation, NGO, Protest, Volunteering

by:

Deniz Zehra Tavli

Babys drowning to death, masses of rescued people trapped on life boats for weeks, people in need seeking for help and encountering inhumane migration politics, helping hands being criminalized – this is crucial point in human history: If we, as independent, enlightened, socially engaged, politically participatory people who value and live human rights will not come together, join forces and fight against the criminal asylum politics of several governments, then the knowledge and insights of all mistakes made in history, all those deaths and suffering, will be in vain.

Letting people drown in the Mediterranean Sea to further seal off Europe and win political points is unbearable and against any humanitarian values. Migration is and has always been part of our society! Instead of closing borders, we need a Europe that is open, cities that show solidarity and harbours that are safe.

SEALIFT is an international movement, supported by several civil society alliances and people. They declare their solidarity with people who are forced to flee their homes. From German and European policy makers, they are demanding the establishment of safe routes for refugees, to stop the criminalisation of sea rescue and to receive them in a humane way whilst respecting their rights.

How you can support SEALIFT:

TAKE A STAND! Use the orange colour everywhere to show your unconditional solidarity with refugees and sea rescue.

GET ACTIVE! Convince your city, your borough or local community to welcome refugees.

TELL EVERYONE! Follow their social-media-channels, report on your blog about the movement and encourage journalists to write about SEALIFT

Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) is a decentralized collective of educators, researchers and grassroots activists working to promote an economy based on democratic participation, worker and community ownership, social and economic justice, and ecological sustainability. Their strategy implies all forms of grassroots journalism, organizing support, cross-sector networking and movement-building.

GEO is a founding organizational member of the Data Commons Project, a collaborative effort to create a shared, public database of the cooperative economy in North America.

The members of GEO are deeply committed to honoring the self-respect and self-empowerment of others without regard to gender, race, ethnicity, or class. They see profiteering, wealth extraction, and neo-colonialism as substantially underpinning all systems of oppression and underrepresentation.

Feel encouraged to support GEO by either joining their network, becoming a contributor in several areas, making a donation or simply spreading their contents through your channels.

Electric shocks. Water forced into your mouth. Rape. Mock executions. Exposure to light for weeks. Torture has many facets, but aims at the single goal of breaking one's dignity as a human being.

We are currently witnessing a global crisis on torture, although laws against it are in place almost everywhere. It is evident that laws alone are not enough. Torture is thriving because rather than respecting the law, many governments are either actively using torture or turning a blind eye on it.

This is also the case in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Therefore the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) works on behalf of all human beings – Israelis, Palestinians, labor migrants, and other foreign nationals residing in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Established in 1990, PCATI works to protect them from torture and ill-treatment at the hands of Israeli law enforcement and investigatory authorities. The vision of the Jerusalem based non-profit organizsation is to eradicate the culture of torture and to end the absolute impunity granted to torturers in Israel.

Feel encouraged to raise awareness of this topic and support the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel by spreading their message or donating to support their work against torture.

Credits: Amnesty International, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI)

Immigration judge John J. McCarrick recognized the gap in representation left by the absence of a public defender system in immigration removal proceedings—a gap that in his view threatens the statutory and constitutional rights of detained indigent immigrants. With the aim of publicly urging Arizona attorneys to fill this gap, the Florence Project was created in 1989.

Today, the Florence Project is dedicated to providing free legal services to the more than 3,000 people detained on any given day in remote detention facilities in Florence and Eloy and children’s shelters in Phoenix. The Project also participates in local and national advocacy and outreach initiatives to amplify the voice of immigrant detainees.

The vision of the Florence Project is to ensure that all immigrants facing removal have access to counsel, understand their rights under the law, and are treated fairly and humanely.

Feel encouraged to support The Florence Project by donating or volunteering and spreading their content through your preferred channel to a wider public!

SOS MEDITERRANEE is a European maritime and humanitarian organization for the rescue of life in the Mediterranean. It was founded by citizens in May 2015 in response to the deaths in the Mediterranean and the failure of the European Union to prevent these deaths.

SOS MEDITERRANEE works as a European association with teams in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland in a European network, jointly financing and operating the rescue ship Aquarius, which has been in continuous operation since February 2016 in international waters between Italy and Libya. The medical care has been provided by Doctors without Borders since May 2016. Since launching our operation we have welcomed more than 28,000 refugees aboard the Aquarius.

Your support is crucial in reaching the goal of SOS MEDITERRANEE: build up a sustainable, civil and european sea rescue.

You are a translator, project manager, public relations officer, a designer etc.? Share your talent with them or donate to support their important work!

Amnesty International has documented US immigration agents forcibly separating families of asylum seekers, even when they have proof of their family relationships and the persecution that they have fled. The long-term detention of asylum seekers is widely documented to negatively affect both their psychological well-being and their ability to lodge asylum claims under US law.

Help seperated families by:

1) TAKING ACTIONWrite a letter, send an email, call, fax or tweet:

Calling on CBP authorities ( Customs and Border Protection) to follow US national detention standards that require them to process family members together and maintain family unity;

Calling on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to immediately reunite the four families in family detention; expedite the families’ parole; and, whenever possible, provide alternatives to detention for all families as their asylum claims are considered;

Urging the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Inspector General to investigate CBP and ICE practices, to ensure DHS agency officials are not separating asylum-seeking parents from their children in detention in violation of US polices on family unity.

President Assad's extermination of his own people has been chillingly surgical: he surrounds towns so civilians can't leave, cuts off access to food and medicine, and drops bombs, even chemical weapons, on desperate families. 400,000 have died -- and he's just started in on a new target.

There's one reason why Assad's been able to continue with this destruction: Russia. But now there's one thing Russia may care about more than Syria: saving the World Cup it hosts this year.

The British Prime Minister just announced no Ministers will attend. Australia, Japan and Poland may be next. And there's massive debate in Germany about a boycott. Russia could finally be pushed to stop the bombing by getting more governments and players to join in opposing the World #Cupofshame.

Sign the Avaaz petition to support the boycott of this year's World Cup in Russia and urge the government to stop the bombing in Syria!

Bissan Fakih, a Syrian activist and campaigner wrote a heart-rendering report from the besieged suburb Ghouta before the recent chemical attacks. More than 1330 civilians lost their lives during these attacks of the Syrian regime and their Russian ally, among them 234 children. Around 130,000 people fled the area of Eastern Ghouta.

The civil society of Ghouta survived brutal assaults in the past months and an ongoing siege of 5 years - “longer even than the siege of Leningrad”, writes Bissan in her report posted on The Syria Campaign, a human rights organization that supports Syria’s civil society through widespread campaign work.

Read her full plea for humanity, activism and engagement here and feel encouraged to support this important project which aims to amplify the voices of the unheard people leaving Ghouta.

The Abortion Rights Campaign and coalition of pro-choice groups in Ireland are gathering signatures to call for a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland.

The Amendment equates the right to life of a pregnant woman with that of an embryo or foetus. In doing so it criminalises abortion in all cases except where to continue a pregnancy would result in death.

The campaigners state that this law violates human rights of women in Ireland and goes against international human rights norms. Furthermore it denies access to basic health care, resulting in more than 154,000 persons concerned to travel overseas for an abortion since 1980 and does not reflect present public opinion in Ireland.

If you wish to pave the way for a more equal, safe, and healthy Ireland, respecting women's rights as human rights, sign the petition of the Abortion Rights Campaign and share their contents in your circles.

Forced to marry in the age of 15, Noura Hussein ran away from home and sought refugee with her aunt. She was tricked into returning by her father, who handed her over to her husband's family.After Hussein refused to consummate the marriage, her husband's relatives held her down while he raped her. A day later her husband tried to rape her again, and Noura stabbed him to death. When she went to her parents for support, they turned her in to the police.

The harrowing details of her case have set social media and WhatsApp ablaze in Sudan. And in recent days it has captured international attention with the hashtags #JusticeforNoura and #SaveNoura. Thousands of people have shared a change.org petition.

Noura became also an symbol for the fact that one in every three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence at one time in their lives with intimate partner violence being the most predominant. Two out of three women have been physically assaulted by their partners.

On Monday (21 June), the United nations – UN Women, UNHCR, UNFPA have called on the Sudanese government to grant clemency in the case of Noura. We call you to support the change.org campaign to get #JusticeForNoura!